Chapter 80: The Physical Therapy Sessions

POV: Georgia

Recovery was slow, painful, and, unfortunately, the one place where I had too much time to think.

The physical therapy room occupied the basement of the health center, a windowless space that smelled like rubber mats and menthol. Somehow, that smell followed me around long after I left, clinging to my clothes and hair like a reminder of everything I couldn’t outrun. One narrow window near the ceiling let in a thin slice of daylight, too high to see through properly. All I could make out were people’s ankles as they walked past, fragments of lives moving on without me.

Sneakers.

Boots.

Once, a pair of yellow rain boots stopped for a second before disappearing again. I remember wondering who they belonged to, whether they were happy, whether they’d ever spent an afternoon staring at a ceiling and counting foam tiles because their body had betrayed them.

I came here four times a week. It became the one place where my days slowed down enough for everything I’d been avoiding to catch up with me, where the silence pressed in and forced me to face the thoughts I usually managed to outrun.

Bella’s eyes were still stuck in my head.

I’d been carrying that flash of amber around since the common room, replaying it every time I stopped moving, every time the world went quiet enough to let the memory surface. Bright. Impossible. Gone almost before I’d had time to understand what I’d seen. Some nights, I swore I could still feel the way the air had changed in that room, charged and dangerous, like the moment before a storm breaks.

"Okay, Georgia," my therapist said, brisk and professional. She knelt beside my injured leg, clipboard balanced on one knee, her pen tapping against the metal clip. "Same as Monday. Ten lifts. Slow. Don’t let your knee wobble."

I lay back and lifted my leg.

Ten inches.

Maybe eleven.

It felt like I was trying to lift a car, my thigh screaming in protest at a movement that used to be effortless, automatic, something I never had to think about.

One.

Two.

Three.

The problem with slow exercises was that they gave my brain way too much free time. So, naturally, mine went straight back to the fall.

I’d replayed it so many times I knew every second, every heartbeat, every small sound the crowd made before everything went wrong.

The music starts.

The first minute is perfect. Better than perfect. The best I’ve ever skated. For sixty glorious seconds, I forget about my mother, about Rosethorne, about the strange gold-eyed boy who haunted every corner of my mind. There is only the ice and the music and the feeling of my body doing exactly what I ask of it.

Then I go into the jump, and my blade feels wrong.

Loose.

There was a little give beneath my foot, just enough to make me notice. Like a tooth that’s about to come loose, that small, sickening wrongness that your body registers a half-second before your mind catches up.

I adjusted.

I landed anyway.

The next jump was worse.

The blade shifted under my weight. My ankle rolled. The ice came up fast, closer and closer until it filled my entire vision, cold and unforgiving.

My knee hit at the wrong angle.

Mom screamed my name from the stands, her voice cracking halfway through it, and even through the pain and the panic, some small part of me catalogued that crack, filed it away as proof that she loved me more than she loved my scores. It was almost funny, the things you noticed while your world was ending.

And underneath all of that, there was that strange pull in my chest. Warm and desperate, reaching toward the stands as if it could drag me there faster than my body could crawl. Toward Puck. It always seemed to reach toward Puck.

Four.

Five.

Six.

I kept going back to the jump before the fall.

The blade had been loose.

I’d felt it before I took off.

I’d known.

I just hadn’t had time to stop.

Somebody tampered with my skate.

The thought had been sitting in my head for weeks now, growing heavier every time I let it surface, until it felt less like a suspicion and more like a fact I hadn’t yet found the courage to say out loud.

Somebody wanted me to fall.

"Good," my therapist said. "Keep breathing. Don’t hold it."

I hadn’t even realized I was holding my breath.

Seven.

Eight.

Nine.

My leg started shaking, a fine tremor that ran from my thigh all the way down to my ankle. The muscles around my knee burned, a deep, bone-level ache that made my eyes sting.

Ten.

I let my leg drop onto the mat, grateful for the small mercy of stillness.

My therapist immediately wrote something down, her pen moving quickly across the page, and I wondered, not for the first time, what exactly she recorded about me. Whether there was a column somewhere for patients who asked too many questions.

Next came the stationary bike.

My favorite.

Obviously.

Twenty minutes of pedaling so slowly the wheel barely turned, staring at a cinderblock wall that had been scuffed along the bottom by years of wheelchairs and equipment, evidence of countless other people who had sat in this exact spot, nursing their own private catastrophes.

I opened my notebook across the handlebars.

I didn’t add anything.

I just read.

The left column was everything that pointed toward sabotage.

The blade mount.

The technician who’d hung up on me.

The phone number that no longer existed, disconnected as if it had never belonged to anyone, as if someone had reached into the world and erased a piece of it just to keep me from asking questions.

Bianca’s voice through the door, sharp and hushed.

The twins being nice.

Too nice.

Nice in a way that felt practiced, rehearsed, like a performance staged specifically for my benefit.

And Darcy.

Darcy knowing things he shouldn’t. The way his eyes had flicked away from mine a second too late, the way his voice had faltered just slightly when I’d pressed him for details he had no business knowing.

The right column was harder to explain.

Puck getting slammed into the boards and getting back up like it hadn’t hurt, like his body simply refused to acknowledge an injury that should have ended his season.

His skin, ridiculously hot, the one time I’d brushed his arm in the hallway, a heat that had nothing to do with exertion or fever, something older and stranger than either.

The gold in his eyes.

There and gone again, quick as a struck match.

I’d tried calling it a trick of the light, except it wasn’t the light.

It was him.

Then there were the handprints.

Four fingers and a thumb pressed into the steel railing hard enough to bend it, as if metal were clay, as if the person who’d left that mark had forgotten, just for a second, what he was supposed to be capable of.

The howling everyone called coyotes.

Except coyotes didn’t sound like that.

They didn’t sound that close.

That deliberate.

There were the empty streets on certain nights, too. Streets that should have been crowded with students but somehow weren’t, as though the entire school had agreed, without a single spoken word, to disappear all at once.

Bella.

Amber eyes.

The way she’d run out of the common room afterward.

Too fast.

Way too fast, faster than anything human should be able to move.

I’d been cataloguing all of it for weeks, filling page after page with details that refused to add up to anything sane.

When I first wrote everything down, it looked ridiculous. A bunch of unrelated things I’d noticed because I was injured, paranoid, exhausted, whatever. I’d told myself that so many times I’d almost believed it.

But sitting there on the bike, with nothing to distract me, the list looked different.

Every strange thing had something to do with bodies.

Bodies that were too fast.

Too strong.

Too warm.

Bodies that shouldn’t be able to do the things I’d seen them do.

And mine, slow and breakable and stubbornly, achingly human, sat in the middle of it all like the one piece that didn’t belong.

The timer beeped.

I closed the notebook.

My therapist helped me back onto the table for the last part of the session. She bent my knee slowly, pressing with both hands while I gritted my teeth, focusing on the ceiling tiles instead of the fire spreading through my joint.

She was careful.

It still hurt like hell.

The pain traveled deep, settling somewhere underneath the muscle and bone, a reminder that some wounds didn’t care how careful anyone was.

"Okay," she said eventually. "Breathe out. That’s all for today."

She released my leg.

The ache spread into a dull throb, radiating outward until it filled the whole limb.

I lay there for a minute, staring at the ceiling tiles and counting the little dents in the foam while she went through her notes, grateful for the excuse to avoid conversation, to just exist in the quiet for a few seconds longer.

She flipped back several pages.

Then forward again, her brow furrowed slightly in concentration.

"You’re doing well," she said. Her voice warmed. "Your range of motion is improving. That’s exactly where we want you."

Weeks.

I’d been doing this for weeks.

And progress still felt painfully slow, each small victory swallowed by the enormity of everything I’d lost.

"Is that good?" I asked, hating how small my voice sounded.

She glanced at me.

"It’s normal."

She smiled, easy and practiced, the kind of smile designed to reassure rather than inform.

"Ligament injuries take time. It’s a slow process. There’s no way to rush it."

"Right."

I sat up carefully, testing the weight on my knee before trusting it fully.

She looked back down at her clipboard.

The question had been sitting in my throat for days, pressing against my teeth every time I opened my mouth to speak.

Actually, there were a lot of questions sitting there.

They were starting to pile up, stacking into something heavy enough that I could feel its weight whenever I tried to sleep.

Everybody knew about the boy with the broken collarbone.

He was on the hockey team, and he’d been back at practice in two days, a fact that had circulated through the dining hall like gospel.

I’d heard the story at least three times, each version slightly different but somehow arriving at the same impossible conclusion. Every time, people talked about it in low voices, wide-eyed and impressed, as if he’d done something incredible rather than something that should have been medically implausible.

Rosethorne kids bounce back.

They’d laugh when they said it.

A quick little huff, as though it were obvious, as though there were nothing strange at all about a body healing shattered bone in the time it took most people to recover from a bad cold.

But I’d wrecked my knee on a rink in front of a crowd, and weeks of physical therapy had barely moved me forward. The unfairness of it sat sour in my chest, tangled up with something closer to fear.

I was still sitting there when I finally asked.

"Can I ask you something kind of random?"

"Of course," she said, still writing.

"Do Rosethorne kids just heal faster?"

Her pen stopped, hovering above the page as though frozen mid-thought.

I almost laughed because suddenly I knew I’d hit something, some nerve buried just beneath the professional calm she wore like armor.

"Like, is that a thing?" I continued. "Everyone keeps talking about it. I feel like I’m the only person here who takes a normal amount of time to heal."

I added a small laugh at the end.

Just enough to make it sound casual.

Just a joke.

Just me being curious.

Her pen stayed still.

She looked up.

She smiled.

But the smile was wrong.

It started normally, then flickered, a crack running through the practiced warmth before she could seal it shut again. Her mouth tightened before she seemed to catch herself and soften it, though not quickly enough to erase what I’d already seen.

Her eyes dropped to the clipboard, unable, it seemed, to meet mine.

"Well," she said carefully, "every body is different."

"I know, but..."

"Have you been icing after your sessions?" she asked, suddenly brighter, her voice pitched a half-step too high. "Twenty minutes on, twenty minutes off. It really helps with the swelling."

She was already looking back down at her notes, closing the door on the conversation before I could push it open any further.

And just like that, the question was gone, swallowed by the same careful silence that seemed to swallow everything at Rosethorne.